Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media » Cool Website Tuesdays

Cool Website Tuesdays: Every Person In New York

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:00:29 +0000

This guy is sketching everyone in New York City. All 8 million of them.

Very cool.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: ClickTale

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:00:35 +0000

Need to track where your users are pointing at, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg? Want to record movies of what your users are doing? Looking for something that’s a bit more than Google Analytics, but not Omniture?

Then try out ClickTale, a new analytics tool that I test drove a month ago.

ClickTale gives you a good idea of what your users are doing so you can correct site issues fast. It records complete sessions, allows you to throttle usage so you don’t record every session, and gives you those nifty heat maps that wow and amaze executives.

The price is about right — $99 a month gets you started — but the only complaint I have is that their freemium levels don’t give you enough of a taste of what the tool can do (really, I need a better idea if the heat maps are worth it.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Clients From Hell

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:00:36 +0000

Enough said.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Attention Wizard

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:00:31 +0000

One of the way cool, nifty things that you get by working for an online marketing education company is access to great tools that are just a bit beta. That’s just the sort of thing we needed over at Online Marketing Summit as we do usability testing and other analysis work.

Enter Attention Wizard. Attention Wizard is a tool that shows possible eye tracking without the human part. The smart folks over at Site Tuners (Thanks Tim, for the invite) have written an algorithm that produces an “attention heatmap”, a way of saying here’s some possible areas that the users are paying attention to based on color and Gestalt theory. All you have to do is upload a screen shot, and in five minutes, it gives you results of what it could look like.

I did it with Online Marketing Summit (click on the thumbnail) to show you what one of their results are.

Their sales points

Can be used with actual screenshots or page design mock-ups
Instant results – no eye-movement or mouse-tracking data collection needed
Tells you what people are paying attention to, and what they ignore
Easily identify landing page problems & increase your conversion rates

Our take aways

People’s eyes go right to the schedule tab, which is a good thing.
We have this photo image in the first paragraph of text that does nothing. It’s providing no value to the user while attracting a lot of attention.
The testimonials are getting a lot of attention.
I think Attention Wizard is giving too much weight to the photo.
Overall, the eye is scanning the page well.

We’re going to make more changes, but the goal is to get results quickly and increase conversion rate on the site, and that’s what we got with Attention Wizard.

My honest opinion about Attention Wizard?

I wouldn’t take this as gospel science (is eye tracking that now, anyways?), but it’s a good first cut at “well, let’s see what we have.” They claim a 75 percent rate of matching eye and mouse tracking, and that’s good enough for me. It’s much better to do several tests with this tool (which would be great as a subscription model site) than spending $5,000 for an eye tracking system that no one’s going use because, well, it’s hard to use.

It’s a great tool that’s only going to get better once they work out the kinks.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: The Weather

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:00:50 +0000

Okay, it’s more than that, because I don’t want to write it in the headline. Not safe for work. Still low-tech. Still funny.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Global Language Monitor

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:00:18 +0000

Did you even know there were a million words in the English language? I vote for bangster. Whatever that means.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Twitpocalypse.com

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:00:38 +0000

From Twitpocalypse:

“The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,6471

For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.

When will this happen? Check here often, and we will tell you how close we are to the Twitpocalypse.”

Props out to ShortFormBlog for finding this one.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: New York Times Photojournalism

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:00:53 +0000

I’m a sucker for print, and the New York Times is one of the best journalism web properties. They released a photo viewer of their best photojournalism work, and it’s very, very cool.

Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: The League Of Movable Type

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:00:13 +0000

I’m kind of conflicted about Open Source, but at least for fonts The League Of Movable Type has a cool website. Maybe for true typography on the web, they can advance the cause.

Their manifesto:

We are Caroline and Micah, the founders of The League. As designers on the web, we have a calling to raise the standards of the web-design world. We’re not the only ones who value good design, and it’s time for the web world to catch up with it. We understand the challenges that comes with the internet, but with our recent discovery of @font-face, we started getting excited. For those who aren’t up to speed, @font-face is a fairly new addition to web styling, letting a designer specify the location of their own font files. Instead of having to design with just a handful of web-friendly fonts, we’ll be able to use any typeface we desire. Well, that’s our vision, anyway.

Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Wufoo

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:00:22 +0000

Wufoo is a very effective and easy to use form building tool that allows normal people (i.e. marketing managers and other non-techies) to build web forms quickly and easily without knowing programming. The form entries are collected in a database, and can be exported out to Microsoft Excel.

Or, isn’t Excel the marketing manager’s best friend?

You can have your designers make design changes with a CSS editing area, but the forms are designed to be very usable (I was impressed), and for short term form management, this is a great tool. For a longer term project, it’s better to go with custom programming.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: The Website Is Down (.com)

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:00:31 +0000

You just can’t make this stuff up. I like the sales guy simulator.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Balthaser Studios

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:17:49 +0000

This is was once cutting edge Flash work. Scary.

Jakob Nielsen probably thought it was 99 percent bad.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Wireframes Magazine

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:00:09 +0000

He’s Canadian, so what, but the author of Wireframes Magazine finds funky deliverables that Information Architects use, and publishes them. It’s pretty cool, to see other ideas.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Short Form Blog

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:00:24 +0000

Writing less. Saying more.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Infragistics’ Quince

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:00:26 +0000

I can never say Infragistics right, but they produce top notch controls for the ASP.NET world. Now they have something else that is way cool: Quince, a great little directory of user interface patterns that is built using SilverLight. J. Ambrose Little, a User Experience guy over there, wrote an extensive blog post about the new tool.

You can navigate through different patterns four different ways (I find user tasks especially useful), search them via keyword, and sort through them by letter. Very, very easy to use.

The best part? If you have a design pattern you want to submit, you can do it through the site, and the Infragistics team will review it and post it. It’s got all the requisite social networking tools with it!Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Template Monster

Patrick Neeman — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:07:34 +0000

I’ve been doing very simple company sites, and frankly, they don’t need too much information architecture. Think about it — how many different ways can you display a case study? What else is there to use other than About Us?

Most of the company sites I’ve been designing have been fairly static. For new ideas, I’ve been popping over to Template Monster. They have pages and pages of ideas, and if you want to pick one, the designs are fairly cheap, usually around $70. Not bad, considering you get the PSD file to start from.

I wonder when there’s going to be an Information Architecture Monster.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: WhiteHouse.gov

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:00:08 +0000

For obvious reasons. If you look closely, you can see George W. Bush leaving — for the last time. The new Obama site is a thing of beauty.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Whooper Sacrifice

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:00:55 +0000

What would you do for a whopper? This is a great application for Facebook and website that creates some fun in exchange for free food. I don’t know if it will result in extra sales, but this is exactly a fun way to attach a reward component to social networking.

And, it’s been very successful from an awareness standpoint (Other posts at The Future of Ads, Inside Facebook). What do you think?Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Tweet Later

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:00:34 +0000

Let’s face it: twitter is a great promotion tool, but not much else other than information overdose for the digirati. For the promotion part, Tweet Later is a tool that allows you to schedule your twitter posts. You can also track keywords in the public keyword stream to keep up on what you want to keep up.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Cosmic Motors

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:00:26 +0000

Talk about proper branding, Cosmic Motors is cool.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: FiveThirtyEight.com

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:00:34 +0000

I’ve done my part (dropped off my absentee ballot at the poll, bypassing the hordes that like standing in line), so now all I can do is wait for the vote. FiveThirtyEight.com feeds that fix — it’s a stat geek’s guide to the election

The site everything from the number of interviews that John McCain and Barack Obama have done (
2,077,765) to projections after projections after projections. It ain’t fancy, but it’s very usable.

Do your part.

Vote. Then visit this site.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: UX Crank

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:00:16 +0000

Blogs don’t have to have a ton of content to be relative, and UX Crank is a great example of this. They have a bunch of concise, simple tips to make your User Experience a better place. My favorites are Things That Are Stupid. Note most of them are in Washington D.C.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Why Does Everything Suck

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:00:05 +0000

I like the name, but I love the content of Why Does Everything Suck even more. It’s a straight forward, poke in the eye usability site that sometimes goes off topic, but takes a common sense approach to most things, mostly web-based. Lately, he’s been on a rant about the economy, but who hasn’t?Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Google Transit

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:00:51 +0000

I really don’t like driving. Really. That’s why I live in Los Angeles (actually, Long Beach). I try to take public transportation when possible, which is almost impossible where I live, save the occasional trip to Belmont Shore.

If you don’t like driving and want to get moving without a car, use Google Transit. They aren’t supporting every city yet, but they have Los Angeles and Orange County, which alone shocks me.

All I did was enter in the address I started at, where I wanted to go, and Google did the rest: suggest several locations of “Did you mean?”, showed my alternate routes, and which bus routes I would have to take.

What is amazing about the tie in to their massive search database is that you don’t even have to enter in addresses; you can enter in a business name, it will show you a number of options (say, a restaurant, or your workplace). It also supports multimodal transportation, like going from subway to bus to train in New York City, elegantly.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: New York Times

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:00:29 +0000

In times of breaking news and shocking events, it’s best to have a go-to website for news and content, and there’s no substitute for the old grey lady, the New York Times. While they might not be groundbreaking in their site design, this is one of the easiest sites on the web to navigate, the content has gotten better in recent years, and there’s just something about reading a newspaper of record.

And…

(I know, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still nifty…)

If you want to see something really cool, try the SilverLight version of the paper. It’s slick because it downloads the paper local, so you can read it offline. If looks like the real version of the New York Times, complete with the type, and if you resize the window, it resizes the article and the number of columns.

It automatically syncs when online like RSS Feeds, and the advertisements are overly obtrusive. It’s not free (and I’m a firm believer that all content shouldn’t be free) but at $15 a month, is cheaper than getting the paper delivered.

Would you pay $15 a month for this service?Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: BarCamp

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:00:58 +0000

It’s not so much of a website as an idea: an unconference where the topics are tactical as well as visionary. Where I work at, we’ve been sponsoring BarCamp Los Angeles for a while, and the coverage of cities is amazing.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: T-Shirt Search Engine

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:00:38 +0000

For the special person who doesn’t have enough t-shirts.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Google Chrome

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:00:06 +0000

Not so much a website, but a new browser application (or software platform, as some sites like to state) to check out. It looks like it uses the WebKit rendering engine, so think Safari with a different UI.

It does look pretty slick, but Windows-only for this first Beta. But a slick UI doesn’t not a new platform make, kids.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: The Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:16 +0000

It’s been around forever, but for me, this site never gets old. It’s based on the film connections of Kevin Bacon, and illustrates the power of super-connectors in network models (and that whole six degrees thing). But, did you know there are actors that are more connected than Kevin? Read on…Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Yearbook Yourself

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:00:07 +0000

Upload a photo and get a really bad retro picture of yourself in a yearbook.

That’s a hoot.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:00:41 +0000

Funny as hell. Enough said.

F*** me dead I just opened mine eyes, and lo! I have not updated this since I fell in love. You would not believe that I actually have a life. Jealous much? Don’t be, it was very painful.

I am recuperating with drinking a lot of water, playing The Sims, just generally being a coach to the local soccer team, my day lasts forever from 4:55am to till I fall into bed at midnight. I am so over it. I need a holiday.

I wish one day I will have time to blog again. One day I will find my magic genie! I keep looking, anyway!

Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: 9 Rules

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:00:03 +0000

It’s a great blog community, evoling as blogs have. More importantly, it’s a comfortable community, as in they don’t get all snooty like some bloggers do.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Flight Stats

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:45 +0000

The best websites are the sites that do something for you without doing any work, and Flight Stats fits that bill. The site is prefect for the traveller that wants to know how long their flight is delayed, and other information like on-time statistics and airports around the country. Everything is easy to use (notice I didn’t say attractive, I said easy to use), and most importantly, they send you updates on how long your flight is delayed to all kinds of devices.

Let’s put it this way — it’s perfect for an evening at SFO.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Heavy Little Objects

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:00:39 +0000

It’s my blog, and I can feature who I want, so I’m featuring a friend of mine’s blog, Heavy Little Objects. Mack Reed writes a blog about the little things in our life, the trinkets, bottle caps and the like, that occupy space with us. He does it just for the pure joy of writing and documenting a piece of his life.

Very cool.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: MyGallons

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:00:29 +0000

The domain name kind of sucks, and it’s not exactly an original idea (people have been doing this for years, and part of the reason we’re in this mess is because of the investors buying futures, which is the investing in the future price of gas) but Mashable points out MyGallons.com is capitalizing on the current situation with consumers where can lock the price of gas in at a certain price.

How it works:

Pay the $29.95 membership fee and get a card in the mail
Pre-purchase gas at a certain price
Use the card at any of the 200,000 participating stations in the network

The site is fairly usable, but when I checked it, there was no place to look for locations near me, but I was able to check out how much I would save. I haven’t been driving a lot lately, but they estimated my savings at $400 a year. That’s ironically just about what I would set down at a blackjack table in Las Vegas, so I don’t see it as that much of a savings.

But if you want to hedge your bets, this is the place to go.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Yelp!

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:00:30 +0000

Okay, it’s been around for a while, but it’s one of my favorite sites, and is a good example what happens when the content is interesting, and the community really knows how to promote, online and offline.

Yelp! is a social network-y review site (okay, it’s about adding friends and comments, but that’s how most social networking sites define it, whatever) that contains thousands of reviews, mostly of local businesses. Need a lousy hotel in Anchorage? It’s there! A great restaurant in Tempe to get drunk at? It’s there!

They have all kinds of nifty widgets to add to your blog.

One lament — how about opening up a Canadian site, yo. I have a bunch of restaurants to review up there.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: My Starbucks Idea

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:00:20 +0000

I don’t really much like Starbucks: I think there are too many of them, and I usually get sick off of their coffee drinks. However, I think My Starbucks Idea is a phenomenal implementation of an social voting and networking, Digg-like — using your customers to generate ideas on how to your company.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: GlassDoor

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:00:46 +0000

Remember The Vault? It was the Web 1.0 version of a message board for reviewing companies. It seemed cool at the time — wow, look at all the messages talking about not-so-stellar management. But like all sites, it’s pretty much a shadow of it’s former self, mainly because it wasn’t very sticky.

Enter GlassDoor, the new entry into the “review your company” sweepstakes. It has a bunch of me too features, but the site is much easier to use (sooner or later they’ll have to add advertising), and there are a bunch of contextual searches.

The most intriguing feature is the salary ranges for each company. Boy, that’s going to make some companies uneasy.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Kayak

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:00:36 +0000

I travel a bit for a work and for goofing off, and hate paying too much for airline travel. I also want my choice of times and flights.

Enter Kayak. One of the best examples of Web 2.0 design, it’s simple, offers my options to change my search on the fly, and it’s fast. I love the site. I don’t know how they make their money, because sometimes I book somewhere else, but whatever they are doing, keep it up.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Hamster Dance

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:00:14 +0000

Absolutely useless, but I just had to do it.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: User Interface Resource Center

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:00:45 +0000

The content’s a bit thin right now, but if they keep it up, this will become a really good resource for UI experts and not-so-experts. Read on…Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Caller Complaints

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:00:56 +0000

Look at the Caller ID on your phone, and don’t recognize the number? Caller Complaints is a community policed database of phone numbers that are basically telemarketers. The Digg style complaint rating is very, very cool.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Freedom Speaks

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:00:34 +0000

Yeah, yeah, it’s political season, so there should be a few political sites, right? Freedom Speaks is a for-profit political forum that lets you send letters to your political representatives across the board. It has all the bells and whistles for a social website, and seems to be getting some traction, generating a few thousand visitors a month despite being launched just recently.

One of the best features is when you click on a profile, you can see all of the representatives for that person. Very cool.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: GuerillaMail

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:47 +0000

Need a disposable email address? GuerillaMail is for you. You can sign up for the service, and it will create email addresses that are good for 15 minutes, perfect for those online services that will eventually resell those email addresses and spam you.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: Browser Shots

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:00:19 +0000

Browser Shots takes a screen shot of your website for quality assurance purposes in over 40 browsers available on the web — testing it across the board in PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. Excuse me while I fix some issues I found in Galeon 1.3.20.Similar Posts:

Cool Website Tuesdays: SellaBand

Patrick Neeman — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:31:21 +0000

From TechCrunch:

Music fans on SellaBand invest 10 dollars in an artist they want to back. If the artist gets to 5,000 ‘believers’ they get 50,000 dollars and then SellaBand steps in to get the band to record an album in a real studio. Each fan gets a limited edition CD. If the artist doesn’t reach $50,000, the fans can get their money back or give it to another artist.

Visit the site — cool idea. Another way for bands to make it big.

(By the way, I purchased a limited edition album from Mandy Leigh — good stuff, and I used to review music a long time ago, so my opinion counts. You should buy it too).Similar Posts: